Bristol Wireless member Nigel Legg writes: The focus of the fourth Bristol & Bath IoT meetup on Monday 21st November was security – making your things secure. There have been some DDoS attacks that used insecure internet-connected consumer goods to create botnets, and Carl Shaw from Cerberus Security Labs talked us through a process to […]

The strangest occurrences could affect the running of networks. For instance, part of Bristol Wireless’ own network was once knocked out of action by a squirrel trying to store nuts for the winter inside a piece of our hardware. However, it’s not just small operators like ourselves that run this risk as big boys Virgin […]

After 4 very happy years at Windmill Hill City Farm, Bristol Wireless has moved. Our move has taken us from south of the River Avon in Bedminster back to Easton where Bristol Wireless started over 14 years ago as an idea in the minds of some under-employed local techies. More than that we’ve moved into […]

This afternoon, our members Nigel Legg and Benedict Gaster turned up at the lab with the piece of hardware shown below that’s going to be tested on the Bristol Wireless network. It’s an IoT gateway configured under LoRaWAN, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification, that’s fully open source. Not only is it open […]

There’s a fair bit going on in Bristol at the moment as regards the Internet of Things (IoT) and these were reported on earlier this week by Nigel Legg, under the headline “Smart City done Smarter?“. Nigel’s post is reproduced in full below with his kind permission (with a couple of links added. Ed.). My […]

CiviCRM is a great free and open source CRM package that’s used by thousands of organisations (many in the community and voluntary sectors. Ed.) around the world to maintain their contacts database, produce email newsletters and much, much more. We at Bristol Wireless have been using CiviCRM for many years for those first two above-mentioned […]

Tomorrow is 14th February. Most people know this as Saint Valentine’s Day, when traditionally florists are overworked, restaurants overcharge and a gentleman generally has his motives questioned should he happen to buy lingerie for his lady love. 😉 However, every year 14th February is also I Love Free Software Day. It’s the day when free […]

As part of our network upgrade work, Bristol Wireless has recently retired a couple of Pentium III-powered Compaq Deskpro EN machines that were acting as network gateways and performing other roles too. As these CPUs were only produced for 4 years between 1999 and 2003, that means our hardware is rather long in the tooth. […]

Bristol Wireless has been using the free and open source CiviCRM customer relationship management software to manage its contacts for years. So we were very pleased to hear that CiviCRM’s Core Team is pleased to announce that CiviCRM version 4.7 will be released on 27th January. According to the developers, version 4.7 is packed with […]

Last weekend saw the staging of BarnCamp 2015 (in which Bristol Wireless’ volunteers have been involved since its inception. Ed.). Running from Friday 19th June to Sunday 21st, BarnCamp was as usual a low-cost rural DIY skillsharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups and anybody else […]